For Sonoma Valley High School senior Hanna LaPolla, already an experienced international traveler, this was her first trip to Africa. For Carole Peccorini, who was captivated by African orphans in Uganda 15 months ago, this was her second visit. For Dr. Linda Lea, African travel has become almost routine as more than 200 girls are currently in secondary schools in Africa through a scholarship program Linda created in 2001 and continues to administrate.
There is considerable research to demonstrate that the education of female children in impoverished countries leads to a break in the cycle of poverty and to significantly higher education rates and health outcomes for the next generation.

Linda well knows that Grassroots women have the commitment and the ability to build a different life for their children. This conference, organized against great odds on that troubled continent by African women themselves, will provide opportunities to rural women from isolated regions to tell their stories of successes and challenges as they have developed programs that work well. They will have a chance through this format to network and form affinity groups, to organize and learn from one another about community decision-making, educational opportunities, property ownership and land management.
More than 500 rural African women and 43 non-Africans are expected at this first-ever conference to give a voice to rural women of Africa. The conference is sponsored by Mama na Dada Africa (an organization formed to reduce the vulnerability of girls to exploitation) in partnership with Global Partners for Development, a non-profit resource organization formed by Santa Rosa couple, Peter and Noni Verbiscar-Brown.

Sixteen of Linda Lea’s sponsored students will travel to the meeting, and Dr. Lea will be mentoring and guiding these girls throughout the conference.
Enter Hanna LaPolla. This budding journalist has a passion for travel and a heart for the disadvantaged. Hanna has chosen for her senior project to build a support and connection platform for these 16 girls. She’ll meet them at the conference, observe their reactions, discuss through interpreters their potential responses and then monitor the projects they create through an exchange of letters.

Knowing the cost of a postage stamp there is the equivalent of a full day’s pay, Hanna is collecting funds to cover the cost of mailing at least five letters from each of the 16 senior project partners. As she tells friends, several are showing interest in an African pen pal, so before even making the trip Hanna was stirring up interest and definitive action. By spring, she is confident she will have stirred up enough interest to attract dozens of people to a fundraising dinner where she’ll display the letters, journals and photos of numerous projects completed by her friends in Africa.

Hanna is fairly bursting with excitement as she has wanted forever to travel to Africa. And she has the added pleasure of making such a trip with her grandmother. Patricia Gray of Santa Rosa, a close friend of Dr. Lea, is supporting her granddaughter on this meaningful journey and a six-day stay in Amsterdam for just the two of them on the way home.

Following the conference in Kenya, the tour will journey to Arusha, Tanzania, known as the safari capital of East Africa. Before investigating the zebras and giraffes and breathtaking scenery, the group will visit primary and secondary schools and meet many of the girls sponsored by the Global Partners’ Marlene Assell Scholarship Program. Since Dr. Lea had created this in honor of her departed sister, the program appropriately bears her name.

This year, Linda will personally present high school diplomas to 40 of her sponsored girls. These 40 will qualify for Dr. Lea’s newest innovation, a program designed to provide such grads with safe shelter for the interim period while they pursue higher education or careers. Otherwise their parents would almost certainly sell them into marriage to much older men in exchange for 15 cows.
Linda says, “I believe education gives the girls power to think for themselves. Then they are able to say, ‘This is what I want’ whether that is I want to go to college, or I’m not ready for marriage or I don’t want to start having babies yet.” Ultimately, Linda says she wants to give them a sense of personal choice.
This, she adds with excitement, is revolutionary in the Maasai community. These girls are actually developing life skills not available to their own mothers or grandmothers for some generations.
All 40 of these graduates will need sponsors for their next step of teachers college or vocational training. In addition there will be 50 new students in secondary education. That’s 90 sponsors for Dr. Lea to sign up in just a few months’ time. She’s not daunted by the hard work, however, which must be fitted around her occupation as an educational consultant.
She has nothing but high praise for Peter and Noni and the integrity of the work of Global Partners for Development. She met Peter in Africa and eventually became Educational Director for Global Partners. She sees Peter as an indefatigable, dauntless yet humble defender of the vulnerable. He follows up meticulously to assure that funds go exactly where they are supposed to and that folks are held accountable.

Global Partners forms supportive partnerships with projects throughout East Africa. It’s quite exciting to explore the many components of their work at www.gpfd.org.

Carole Peccorini has only recently come into the Global Partnership fold. Her Butterfly Project, written up in The Sun on March 16, focuses on raising funds for scholarships at the post-secondary level, a need not previously covered through Global Partners’ efforts. Carole’s excitement, she tells me, goes beyond the incredible thrill of such exotic destinations as Nairobi and the Serengeti Plains. She has been richly inspired by meeting fellow travelers through conference calls and e-mails over the past several weeks.
“These are profoundly centered women with such high vision of abundance, creativity and possibility,” Carole proclaimed, adding that, “Amazing things are bound to grow out of this.”